Tag Archives: Vote

Note: OpenStack voting is limited to community members – if you registered by the deadline, you will receive your unique ballot by email. You have 8 votes to distribute as you see fit.

I believe open infrastructure software is essential for our IT future.

Open source has been a critical platform for innovation and creating commercial value for our entire industry; however, we have to deliberately foster communities for open source activities that connect creators, users and sponsors. OpenStack has built exactly that for people interested in infrastructure and that is why I am excited to run for the Foundation Board again.

OpenStack is at a critical juncture in transitioning from a code focus to a community focus.

We must allow the OpenStack code to consolidate around a simple mission while the community explores adjacent spaces. It will be a confusing and challenging transition because we’ll have to create new spaces that leave part of the code behind – what we’d call the Innovator’s Dilemma inside of a single company. And, I don’t think OpenStack has a lot of time to figure this out.

That change requires both strong and collaborative leadership by people who know the community but are not too immersed in the code.

I am seeking community support for my return to the OpenStack Foundation Board. In the two years since I was on the board, I’ve worked in the Kubernetes community to support operators. While on the board, I fought hard to deliver testable interoperability (DefCore) and against expanding the project focus (Big Tent). As a start-up and open source founder, I bring a critical commercial balance to a community that is too easily dominated by large vendor interests.

Re-elected or not, I’m a committed member of the OpenStack community who is enthusiastically supporting the new initiatives by the Foundation. I believe strongly that our industry needs to sponsor and support open infrastructure. I also believe that dominate place for OpenStack IaaS code has changed and we also need to focus those efforts to be highly collaborative.

OpenStack cannot keep starting with “use our code” – we have to start with “let’s understand the challenges.” That’s how we’ll keep building an strong open infrastructure community.

If these ideas resonate with you, then please consider supporting me for the OpenStack board. If they don’t, please vote anyway! There are great candidates on the ballot again and voting supports the community.

And, of course, vote according to our code of conduct: “Members should not attempt to manipulate election results. Open debate is welcome, but vote trading, ballot stuffing and other forms of abuse are not acceptable.”

More importantly, I am committed to open source and open operations. The Apache 2 open source Crowbar project established the baseline (and served as the foundation) for other OpenStack deployment efforts. We don’t just talk about open source, we do open source: our team works in the open (my git account).

Vote for a board because diversity of views is important

OpenStack voting allows you to throw up to 8 votes to a single candidate. While you can put all your eggs into a single basket, I recommend considering a broader slate in voting.

We have an impressive and dedicated list of candidates who will do work for the community. I ask that you consider the board as a team. If you want operators, users, diversity, change, less corporate influence or any flavor of the above then think not just about the individual.

One of my core activities has been to work on addressing community concerns about affinity voting. Gold and Platinum members have little incentive to address this issue. While I’d like to see faster action, it requires changing the by-laws. Any by-law changes need to be made carefully and they also require a vote of the electorate. If you want positive change, you need board members, like me, who are persistent and knowledgeable in board dynamics.

What have I done on the Board? Quite a bit…

It would be easy to get lost in a board of 24 members, but I have not. Armed with my previous board experience, I have been a vocal advocate for the community in board meetings without creating disruption or pulling us off topic.

If registered, you have 8 votes to allocate as you wish. You will get a link via email – you must use that link.

Joseph B George and I are cross-blogging this post because we are jointly seeking your vote(s) for individual member seats on the OpenStack Foundation board. This is key point in the OpenStack journey and we strongly encourage eligible voters to participate no matter who you vote for! As we have said before, success of the Foundation governance process matters just as much as the code because it ensures equal access and limits forking.

We think that OpenStack succeeds because it is collaboratively developed. It is essential that we select board members who have a proven record of community development, a willingness to partner and have demonstrated investment in the project.

Our OpenStack vision favors production operations by being operator, user and ecosystem focused. If elected, we will represent these interests by helping advance deployability, API specifications, open operations and both large and small scale cloud deployments.

Of course, we’re asking for you to consider for both of us; however, if you want to focus on just one then here’s the balance between us. Rob (bio) is a technologist with deep roots in cloud technology, data center operations and open source. Joseph is a business professional with experience new product introduction and enterprise delivery.

Not sure if you can vote? If you registered as an individual member then your name should be on the voting list. In that case, you can vote between 8/20 and 8/24.